Anthea Hartig's most treasured book

Bay Area readers on their special editions

Both as artifact and historiographical New Testament, Carey McWilliams' "Southern California Country: An Island on the Land" (1946) floated to the top of my archival memory of meaning.

Just because one's family, on one side anyway, had been in a place for three generations didn't translate into an aware, intimate knowledge of its cultural landscape. Nay, it took the shepherd of a professor at UCLA in the mid-1980s to lead me to those intellectual foothills by offering a course on the geography of Los Angeles to introduce me to the deep wisdom of McWilliams.

The layered complexity of those places in which I had grown up was thrust uncomfortably, irrevocably in my face with revelations such as: "Indian influence is still perceptible throughout the region, primarily in the long since forgotten origin of such curious place-names as Anacapa, Azusa ... Cucamonga ..." Wait! Cucamonga - that's where I'm from! Learning that nearly all the cities of coastal Southern California were built atop Indian villages blew and continues to blow my mind.

McWilliams revealed the complexities, ironies and meanings of my heimat as no one else ever has. In 1995 I inherited my great-aunt Ethel's first edition of "Southern California County." I used that cherished copy to inspire and complete my dissertation on the changes to that cultural landscape wrought by those involved in the creation of the once-mighty citrus industry.

Like many a historian before, with and I'm guessing after me, just when I thought I had an original notion, I'd turn to that vintage book and like a baby bat learning echolocation, would find that the lawyer-journalist-civil libertarian had already thought of it or something damn similar. But doing well by honoring and expanding those who've come before us really is what keeps history relevant and alive.